Bill’s suite on the plane was a basic budget-hotel affair, a double bed, a shower and a small television. He shaved and repacked his bag to while away some time so that Prince Naif could win the race. Five years of dealing with his Saudi counterpart had taught Bill one lesson: you can take a Bedouin out of a desert, you can take him off his camel and give him the most expensive flying machine in the world, but there was no point trying to take the camel jockey out of him. If the Prince wanted to race his plane on his way to dinner, the CIA chief would oblige.
As Bill’s C141 made its final approach to the runway and the pilot started communication with air traffic control, the counter-jammers went to work. Thousands of listeners tuning into Golden Oldies from Ceylon Radio heard their favourite songs interrupted by a chorus of bagpipes issuing from the cover pulse generators on the plane. The arrival was so secret that even the air traffic controller, used to the arrival of American military planes at odd hours, didn’t know that he was communicating with a VIP flight. Giving respectful instructions to the pilot, he thought, Here comes another plane full of booze and pig-meat for those American spies at the US Embassy.
The plane taxied to the furthest end of the runway and the runway lights were switched on only when it had come to a complete halt. Six identical black Mercedes limousines were parked close to the runway. Four motorcycle outriders — or pilots as they are called in the VIP Security Unit — waited on their Kawasaki 1000 motorcycles in front of the convoy, their helmet earphones on standby for instructions. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman saluted Bill Casey, a salute complete with stamping of the heel and his straight palm parallel with his right eyebrow.
“Welcome, Field Marshal,” he said. The tableau had started as a joke when Bill, in his first meeting with Akhtar, kept calling him Generalissimo. “Well, if I am a general, you must be the field marshal, sir,” Akhtar had said and now he insisted on the role play whenever Bill visited.
“Damn, Akhtar,” Bill Casey raised a limp hand to his eyebrow. “I’m dead tired.”
As the outriders switched their sirens on one by one, General Akhtar and Bill Casey got into the fourth limousine, a posse from CIA’s Special Operations Group, wearing suits and carrying no visible arms, and a group of Pakistani commandos with their sleek little Uzis, got into the other limousines and the journey to the Army House started. It was a forty-minute drive for civilians. The VIP convoy, with all traffic and pedestrian crossings blocked, could make it in twelve minutes, but General Akhtar seemed to be in no hurry.
“Would you like a drink before dinner, sir?” he asked, with both his hands in his lap.
“Are we going straight to dinner?” Bill asked wearily.
“Prince Naif is already there, sir.”
“And my friend,” Bill mimed General Zia’s moustache with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, “is he really having these visions?”
General Akhtar smiled a coy smile, puffed out his chest and said in a very concerned tone. “Eleven years is a long time. He’s a bit tired.”
“Tell me about it.” Bill slumped into his seat. “Go ahead. Get me drunk.” General Zia never served alcohol at his dinners, even state dinners, not even for known alcoholics. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman considered it his duty to keep his guests in good humour, either at his office or during the drive Co the Army House. He tapped the driver’s seat, and without looking back, the man passed him a black canvas bag. Akhtar produced two glasses, a silver ice bucket, a bottle of Royal Salute whisky and poured Bill half a glass and himself a glass of water; he asked the driver to slow down and said, “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” said Bill. “Cheers to you, General. Nice country you got here.” He flicked open the curtain on the limousine window and watched the crowd gathered along the roadside, straining against the security police and waiting for this convoy to hurry up and pass so that they could get on with their lives.
“Sad, though, you can’t sit down somewhere and have a goddam drink. Cheers.”
Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burqa — the only body part visible her left breast feeding her infant child — a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, Singapore Airline’s crew in a van cracking jokes in three languages, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife on a motorbike returning from a fertility clinic, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and in a shopping bag carrying a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a bus full of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital; as the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Army House?”
SEVEN
I stare through the windscreen with such intensity it’s as if I am the one driving the car. I can only admire how Major Kiyani doesn’t believe in giving anyone the right of way on this narrow, potholed road. He maintains his speed in the face of an oncoming truck, flicks the car headlights to full beam, his fingers tap to the music on the steering wheel and at the last possible moment it’s the truck that swerves and pulls off the road. Major Kiyani’s Corolla seems like an extension of his powers, unblinking, unlimited and needing no justification.